Eric A. Cornell, a physicist at NIST and adjunct professor at the University of Colorado, has been awarded the prestigious 1997 Alan T. Waterman Award by the National Science Foundation. The award recognizes outstanding young researchers in any field of science or engineering supported by NSF, and includes a medal and a $500,000 grant for scientific research.
Cornell was recognized for his leading role in creating Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas, and for innovations in manipulating, trapping and cooling atoms that led to this new state of matter. Bose-Einstein condensation, first created in Cornell’s lab at JILA in 1995, occurs when individual atoms merge into a “superatom” at extremely low temperatures. This new form of matter is expected to shed light on quantum mechanics and was created by cooling rubidium atoms using laser and magnetic traps.
The research has received numerous other awards and recognitions, including the King Faisal International Prize in Science, the AAAS-Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Carl Zeiss Award, the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics, the American Physical Society’s I. I. Rabi Award, the Presidential Early Career Award, and NIST’s Samuel W. Stratton Award.
Source: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/1997/04/cornell-wins-nsf-award
Keywords: Bose-Einstein condensation, Quantum Mechanics, Atomic Trapping
